Mumbai: Under a cloud of war, IPL 2025 has been suspended. For a week now before the Board of Control for Cricket in India will review the situation again. If there is no scope of immediate resumption, it’s certain every effort would be made by the Indian cricket establishment to play the remaining 17 matches — 13 league matches and playoffs — of the game’s biggest money spinner.
Go back a few years to 2021 when the world was hit by Covid. As things got better in England, the ECB resumed bilateral cricket behind closed doors.
But the BCCI’s No.1 priority wasn’t to stage the T20 World Cup, for which they held hosting rights. They wanted to complete the suspended edition of IPL, which was halted following the outbreak of the second wave of Covid in India. IPL was played behind closed doors in the UAE in September-October. Then the T20 World Cup followed.
In its 18th year, the IPL has risen to become the single biggest sports property in cricket. In June 2022, JioStar paid a collective sum of ₹48,390 crore to acquire IPL rights; that’s ₹118 crore per match, the second highest per-match value for any sporting property after the NFL. It was a real inflection point where IPL’s media rights value (2023-27) rose three times from where it was in the previous five-year cycle.
For the BCCI, the sheer monetary value of the IPL subsidises a lot of Indian cricket. It does not matter that in comparison, an India international at home is worth a lot less — ₹67.8 crore per match.
{{/usCountry}}For the BCCI, the sheer monetary value of the IPL subsidises a lot of Indian cricket. It does not matter that in comparison, an India international at home is worth a lot less — ₹67.8 crore per match.
{{/usCountry}}As franchise sport culture picked up speed, Indian cricket has seen a massive shift in revenue generation from the pre-IPL years. The cricket calendar was dominated by bilateral cricket, and the men in blue attracted all the eyeballs.
A complete season of IPL in the current cycle is worth ₹8,732 crore for the BCCI. The 17 pending matches are worth ₹2000 crore. Only when the remainder of the matches are played will these media rights proceeds form a part of the IPL central pool revenue. ₹500 crore come annually from title sponsors Tata and around ₹300 crore per year from the other associate sponsors.
The broadcasters recover the rights acquisition costs through advertising. The franchises get half the revenue from the central pool which is disbursed among them equally.
In turn, they make the payouts to players. The money splashed on the auction table is only a small percentage of what the team owners earn. Yet, Rishabh Pant’s pay cheque of ₹27 crore is the highest in cricket. Not just the Indian players, even the best performing T20 players around the globe make the biggest money from the tournament.
Expert opinion is divided if the eventuality in which the remaining IPL matches cannot be held would be covered by insurance.
“Whether an act of war is covered or not and how the current circumstances will be read, it all depends on the fine print of the insurance contract,” said N Santosh, Managing Partner, D&P Advisory.
“In case the IPL resumes, the only loss will be the incremental logistics cost (travel and stay) which is something the BCCI and the franchises would not be sweating over,” he added.
“From the broadcasters’ perspective, they may have to bear some losses because instead of a school holiday season, if the IPL is shifted to September or so, one doesn’t know if the corporates who are potential advertisers will tighten their purses. Some of them were already dealing with tariff uncertainty.”